Military.com has learned that the Department of Defense, for the first time in almost 10 years, has dramatically reduced its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems by approximately 180... decreasing the total number of faiths from 211 to its new number of 31. The changes were iterated in a May 20, 2026, memorandum issued by the Under Secretary of War and signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness[.]
Under Secretary Tata has a serious military service record, so I don't take him to be doing the usual political trolling here. He has some sort of serious purpose in mind. I haven't seen the memorandum, so I don't know how he justified this shift.
I find it noteworthy that of 31 recognized religions, 22 are Christian variations. Islam -- which has Sunni and Shia sects, for example -- gets only one; Judaism gets only one; rather astonishingly, Agnostic remains a recognized religion even though it isn't actually one, as does "No Religion." There is a catchall "Other Religions" code that presumably will be applied to everyone who has been registered as one of the 180 formerly-recognized religions, so just because their faith will no longer be recognized by the military doesn't mean that they'll be forced into one of the remaining categories.
My guess is what they are trying to cut down on is chaplain training hours, but that still makes it strange that you'd have 22 specific variations of one religion and one or none for the others, even faiths with large numbers of practitioners worldwide like Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism.
What will be of significance to me is if the VA follows up by removing the emblems of belief of the no-longer-recognized religions from eligibility for military headstones.
5 comments:
A few things occur to me on this. One, probably minor, is the seeming exclusion of Atheism. Atheism is itself a form of religion to the extent that it proceeds from a first principle that is an article of faith (as most first principles are).
Another is that the dropping of Deism would exclude, at least explicitly, some of our Founders, were they still around.
A third is that the Other Religions (OR) category would seem to serve as a catchall for all of those others no longer explicitly named in the list.
Eric Hines
Interesting.
In 2017 (also under Trump), the DOD expanded the list from just over 100 to 221.
- https://religionnews.com/2017/04/21/defense-department-expands-its-list-of-recognized-religions/
The majority of recognized religions being varieties of Christian might make sense given that about 70% of military personnel are Christians, 20% Catholic and 50% some form of Protestant.
- https://firstliberty.org/news/how-religious-is-our-military/
Well, 22 of 31 is 70.97%, so I suppose there is a sort of proportionality there to the needs of the actual serving members of the force from the Chaplain corps. Still, it's pretty remarkable to specify so carefully so many of the sects in the one case, and then quash the myriad divisions of (say) Buddhism into just one.
Yes, a religious claim of Agnostic is really sort of venturing no firm commitment; the Atheists are making a commitment to a metaphysical belief of a sort.
Yeah, I agree. This seems weird. I wonder how they decided what to keep.
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